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B.C. opioid crisis to get same world-renowned treatment approach as HIV/AIDS

A first-of-its-kind opioid addiction treatment program, first piloted in Vancouver, will soon roll out across the rest of the province as B.C. grapples with nearly 2,800 overdose deaths since 2017.

In a news conference Thursday, members of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and Vancouver Coastal Health released results from a one-year pilot program that took strategies used to reduce the spread of AIDS and implemented them on the streets of downtown Vancouver to combat opioid addiction.

The BOOST collaborative, which stands for Best-practice is Oral Opioid agoniSt Therapy, involved teams of medical providers and staff regularly checking on 1,100 patients to ensure they didn’t miss their daily medication such as methadone, suboxone or prescription heroin.

The program has so far found success, doubling the number of people keeping to their treatment plan. Roughly 79 per cent of patients stuck to treatment for three months.

According to data collected up to November 2017, 55,400 people were struggling with opioid addiction across the province, and only 36,000 had ever been on treatment.

Roughly 60 per cent of people in treatment withdrew in the first six months, and a further 10 per cent withdrew within a year.